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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Your Agent Has a Genome: Sequence-Level Behavioral Analysis and Runtime Governance of LLM-Powered Autonomous Agents

作者:

arXiv:2606.15579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Base Sequence Analysis, a framework that encodes the runtime behavior of LLM-powered autonomous agents into compact symbolic sequences using a four-letter alphabet: X (Explore), E (Execute), P (Plan), and V (Verify). Drawing an analogy to genomic sequence analysis, we apply n-gram pattern mining, Markov transition matrices, and point-biserial correlation to 347 real-world execution traces collected from a production ReAct agent system over 8 days. Our analysis reveals that (1) the trigram P-X-P is the only statistically significant high-risk pattern, lowering success rate by 10.4%; (2) P-ratio is the strongest negative predictor of success (r=-0.256, pV transition probability is only 2.1%, indicating a systemic verification deficit. Based on these findings, we design Governor, a three-layer runtime intervention system comprising a rule engine, a statistical accumulator, and a chi-square-based threshold adaptor. In a natural before/after deployment evaluation (N=101 vs. N=246), Governor achieves a +6.2% absolute increase in task success rate while simultaneously reducing average token consumption by 44%. To validate cross-system generality, we apply the XEPV encoding to 2,000 public SWE-agent trajectories on SWE-bench, confirming that exploration spirals and the E->V verification deficit replicate in an independent system. We outline six research directions including base sequence language models, cross-agent behavioral fingerprinting, and reward shaping, and release an open-source toolkit for reproducibility.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Generative Modeling on Metric Graphs via Neural Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.16273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce, to our knowledge, the first deep generative modeling framework for probability distributions continuously supported on compact metric graphs. Given source and target measures on a metric graph, our method embeds the graph into a smooth ambient space, solves an entropic Kantorovich problem via a neural semidual parameterization, and projects generated samples back onto the original graph. We study two embedded geometries: an extrinsic Euclidean realization and the intrinsic tropical Abel–Jacobi embedding into the Jacobian torus. In both cases, the resulting generator is graph-supported by construction. We prove that, in the joint limit of increasing neural expressivity, the learned generator converges weakly to a valid transport coupling between the original graph measures. Empirically, across a range of geometrically distinct graphs, our method matches or improves upon heuristic transport baselines based on discrete graph OT, while scaling more favorably. Finally, we demonstrate scalability on real-world urban mobility data by training our model on one million Uber pickup locations in Manhattan, New York City.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Poly-Social Risk for Hypertension Among Black and Latina Women

Background: Hypertension is a leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor prominently influenced by health-related social needs (HRSN). Whether detailed information on HRSN can improve identification of hypertension among minoritized women is unknown. Methods: Black and Latina women aged 18-65 years completed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Accountable Health Communities Screening Tool, assessing 13 HRSN domains. Hypertension was ascertained by a validated EHR-based algorithm or self-report of hypertension. Logistic regression tested associations of HRSN with hypertension. LASSO regression with 10-fold cross-validation was used to derive a poly-social risk score in the training set (random 70%) and tested in the validation set (30%) against a sociodemographic model (age, race, income, education). Results: Among 1302 participants (mean [SD] age 40.1 [11.3] years, 70.4% Black, 44.3% Latina), higher cumulative burden of HRSN was associated with increased odds of hypertension (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] for each additional domain of HRSN: 1.07 [95% CI 1.01-1.14], P=0.02). Food insecurity (aOR 2.30 [1.37-3.87], P= 0.002), lapse in utilities (aOR 1.44 [1.04-1.96], P=0.02), poor concentration (aOR 1.57 [1.13-2.17], P=0.007), and social isolation (aOR 1.77 [1.14-2.73], P=0.01) were associated with hypertension. In the validation set, the poly-social risk score did not improve discrimination for hypertension vs. the sociodemographic model (AUC 0.76 [95% CI 0.71-0.81] vs. AUC 0.80 [0.75-0.85]). Conclusion: In this cross-sectional analysis of Black and Latina women, greater cumulative social disadvantage was associated with hypertension. While inclusion of HRSN did not improve hypertension prediction beyond conventional sociodemographic indices, findings may inform targeted interventions among minorities at cardiometabolic risk.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bistable by Construction: Wall-Clock-Calibrated State Monitors Have No Moment-Detection Regime at Agent Cadence

arXiv:2606.19386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime monitors for autonomous agents commonly threshold an accumulated internal state - a behavioural baseline, a drift statistic, or, in our prior work, a modelled affective state. We previously reported a State Saturation Trap: threshold-on-state triggers over a continuous affect engine become near-constant alarms on SWE-bench debugging agents (Modgil 2026). A post-release audit found the engine received dt=0 between actions, so its exponential decay never operated: the published trap is a pure-accumulator result. We correct the record (erratum, v2) and treat the flaw as an experiment. The key variable it exposes is whether a monitor's dynamics are calibrated in sample time (per observation, as in CUSUM) or wall-clock time (half-lives in seconds, as in affect models and EMA baselines). On fixed-rate streams these coincide; on agent streams, where inter-action time varies by orders of magnitude, they do not. A pre-registered sweep over uniform intervals (dt in {0..600}s) on 20 trajectories shows the wall-clock level trigger has two regimes: at dt=60s silent. Every critical dt lies in (1,30]s. Real agent runs measure latency at median 1.53s (p90 2.33s); real coding cadence sits inside the trap regime, vindicating the empirical finding under a corrected mechanism. The structure is a property of the calibration class, not the engine: a minimal wall-clock accumulator over the raw error stream reproduces the same cliff, while a sample-time CUSUM over the identical stream is exactly dt-invariant (20/20). A rising-edge trigger with hysteresis fires 0-3 times per trajectory in every condition. We conclude that wall-clock-calibrated leaky-integrator monitors admit no regime in which they act as moment detectors on agent streams; transition detection escapes the trap at every cadence, but does not recover human intervention timing.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Advances in Scientific Machine Learning for Coupled Fluid Flow and Transport

arXiv:2606.19562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This chapter reviews recent advances in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) for modeling coupled fluid flow and transport phenomena governed by the incompressible Navier-Stokes and scalar transport equations. Such systems, found in applications like turbidity currents and thermal convection, feature strong nonlinear coupling and multiscale behavior that make high-fidelity simulations computationally expensive. To address this, the chapter surveys state-of-the-art SciML methods for building efficient surrogate models, including linear reduced-order techniques based on Singular Value Decomposition (such as Dynamic Mode Decomposition) and nonlinear neural network approaches like Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and $\beta$-Variational Autoencoders ($\beta$-VAEs). It first covers the authors' work combining these models with High Performance Computing strategies, including Adaptive Mesh Refinement/Coarsening (AMR/C) and scientific floating-point data compression. It then presents two new contributions: surrogate modeling of turbidity currents via PINNs, and the extraction of disentangled nonlinear modes from thermal flows using $\beta$-VAEs. Governing equations and representative benchmarks, including lock-exchange flows and Rayleigh-Bénard convection, illustrate these methodologies. The chapter is intentionally long, covering both the mathematical and physical foundations of coupled fluid flow and the computational aspects of state-of-the-art modeling. Overall, it demonstrates how SciML enables fast, accurate approximations of complex coupled systems within the specific data regimes and modeling assumptions considered, while substantially reducing computational cost relative to full-order simulations. Broader capabilities such as real-time prediction and uncertainty quantification remain active research directions whose feasibility depends strongly on the problem at hand.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

AURA: Active-Response Attribution under Treatment Ambiguity in Bacterial Cytological Profiling

When a bacterial sample is exposed to several antibiotics, not every applied drug necessarily acts: if the organism is resistant to one of them, that drug leaves no morphological trace. The clinically meaningful quantity is therefore not which antibiotics were applied, but which ones were active. We show that these two are sharply decoupled in real E. coli microscopy - naively assuming the applied combination equals the active one is correct only about 37% of the time - yet existing computational tools are ill-suited to recovering the active set. Forward perturbation models such as scGen, CPA, and IMPA are designed to predict appearance from treatment, not the reverse, and inverting them degrades sharply; discriminative image classifiers tend to memorise strain- and batch-specific texture and fail to transfer across experimental replicates. We introduce AURA, which reframes the task as constrained, energy-based inverse attribution. Its central inductive bias is that the active set must be a subset of the applied set; this collapses the candidate space and lets AURA infer the active subset of applied antibiotics by decomposing residual morphology into antibiotic response atoms and selecting the subset with the lowest reconstruction energy, using no strain label at test time. AURA-E adds evidence-aware abstention, withholding a prediction when candidate explanations remain near-equally plausible. On cross-replicate transfer in an E. coli cytological profiling dataset, AURA recovers the active antibiotic combination with 95.47% exact-match accuracy.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Stop the Sampler! Classifier-Based Adaptive Stopping for Sampling Kernels

arXiv:2606.16073v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sampling from complex, unnormalized probability densities is a fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. While Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide asymptotic guarantees, they often suffer from slow mixing and high computational costs due to fixed or manually tuned trajectory lengths. In this work, we propose a novel framework that treats trajectory termination as a learnable component of the sampling dynamics. By framing MCMC within the theory of non-acyclic generative flow networks (GFlowNets), we train state-dependent neural classifiers to decide when a trajectory has reached a high-density region and should terminate. We theoretically establish the connection between optimal classifiers and the target density via detailed balance conditions and introduce a multilevel training scheme to facilitate exploration in complex geometries. Experimental results across various benchmark densities demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces average trajectory lengths while improving mode coverage and mixing compared to standard MCMC baselines.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DPC-VQA: Decoupling Quality Perception and Residual Calibration for Video Quality Assessment

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising performance on video quality assessment (VQA) tasks. However, adapting them to new scenarios remains expensive due to large-scale retraining and costly mean opinion score (MOS) annotations. In this paper, we argue that a pretrained MLLM already provides a useful perceptual prior for VQA, and that the main challenge is to efficiently calibrate this prior to the target MOS space. Based on this insight, we propose DPC-VQA, a decoupling perception and calibration framework for video quality assessment. Specifically, DPC-VQA uses a frozen MLLM to provide a base quality estimate and perceptual prior, and employs a lightweight calibration branch to predict a residual correction for target-scenario adaptation. This design avoids costly end-to-end retraining while maintaining reliable performance with lower training and data costs. Extensive experiments on both user-generated content (UGC) and AI-generated content (AIGC) benchmarks show that DPC-VQA achieves competitive performance against representative baselines, while using less than 2% of the trainable parameters of conventional MLLM-based VQA methods and remaining effective with only 20% of MOS labels. The code will be released upon publication.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Rock weathering can counteract river CO<sub>2</sub> emissions induced by permafrost thaw

作者:

Climate-induced permafrost thaw unlocks large stores of organic carbon that are mineralized and emitted as carbon dioxide (CO2) from rivers to the atmosphere1. Concurrently, warming and permafrost thaw can increase mineral weathering rates, thus affecting the release and sequestration of inorganic carbon2–4. Yet how these biological and geological carbon cycles interact and jointly affect CO2 dynamics (emission compared with drawdown) in permafrost rivers remains unknown5. Here we combine CO2 emissions, organic and inorganic solute concentrations, dual carbon isotopes (δ13C–Δ14C) and geochemical modelling to infer how permafrost thaw may affect river biogeochemistry over decades to centuries across the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Leveraging a gradient of thermal permafrost degradation, we find that river CO2 emissions decline, whereas solute fluxes from rock weathering increase with decreasing permafrost cover. Across this region, net CO2 drawdown fluxes from rock weathering are about 35% of river CO2 emissions, varying from around 15% in catchments with continuous permafrost to more than 100% in catchments with discontinuous or isolated permafrost. Thus, carbon fluxes from chemical weathering may become increasingly important with ongoing permafrost thaw, potentially even outpacing river CO2 emissions. Our findings disentangle the interplay between biological and geological carbon fluxes that are important for the cryosphere and the global carbon cycle. Permafrost thaw on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau increases rock-weathering rates while reducing river CO2 emissions, suggesting geological carbon fluxes may eventually outpace thaw-driven emissions.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Menopausal symptoms in peri- and postmenopausal women: systematic review and meta-analysis of prevalence, incidence, comorbidities, and clinical outcomes

Introduction: The global epidemiology of menopausal symptoms among middle-aged and elderly women remains unclear. Methods: Data on prevalence, comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms published up until March 1st 2019 were searched in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases. We used a random-effects model to compute point estimates of prevalence for 24 types of menopausal symptoms. We narratively summarized the patterns of the comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms due to limited data. Results: A total of 239 studies (n{approx}2.5 million middle-aged and elderly women) from 56 countries and regions were included in the analysis. The global pooled prevalence analysis revealed that hot flashes (48%) and night sweats (30%) were highly prevalent, alongside psychological symptoms like insomnia (47%), irritability (46%), anxiety (39%), and depression (30%). Physical symptoms including joint aches/pain (50%), backache (47%), and tiredness (61%) were also commonly reported. Heat intolerance showed the highest prevalence (76%), while symptoms like urinary incontinence (24%) and poor appetite (8%) were less frequent. These findings highlight the diverse and widespread impact of menopause on women globally, with significant variations across symptom types. Africa showed the highest pooled prevalence across a series of symptoms, compared with other continents. We observed high prevalence in developing countries, especially for psychological and physical symptoms; significant intra-Asian variation in vasomotor symptoms; hypertension and obesity as the most common comorbidities; joint pain, urinary incontinence, and vasomotor symptoms as the most incident complaints; and positive associations with cardiovascular disease in the psychological (depression and insomnia) and physical (joint pain) domains. Conclusion: This study highlights the global burden of menopausal symptoms, with significant differences across continents. The findings call for more inclusive research on underrepresented groups (particularly in Africa) and further investigation into drivers of this marked global heterogeneity in prevalence of menopausal symptoms and their comorbidities, incidence and outcomes.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

WallZero: Mastering the Game of WallGo with Strategic Analysis

arXiv:2606.17847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: WallGo is a recently introduced strategic board game popularized by the 2025 Netflix series The Devil's Plan. Although played on a small 7 x 7 board, its combination of stone movement and wall placement yields high game-tree complexity and intricate strategic interactions. Despite its growing popularity, WallGo remains underexplored. This paper presents WallZero, an AlphaZero-based agent for the two-player WallGo setting. We introduce tailored action and feature designs to improve playing performance significantly. In the evaluation, WallZero defeats two professional Go players who participated in this study, securing on average 1.98x more territory per game. Beyond its strength, we use WallZero to assess game fairness and identify key strategies for mastering WallGo. Interestingly, our results show that the opening used in the Netflix series yields a more balanced game. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/wallzero.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Be My Tutor: On-Policy Co-Distillation for Mutual LLM Improvement via Peer Feedback

We study multi-domain LLM training in which two models, each stronger in a different domain, co-evolve by tutoring each other through on-policy feedback. Unlike one-way distillation or single-model fine-tuning, our goal is mutual Pareto improvement: each model improves across domains without losing its original strength. To this end, we propose On-Policy Co-Distillation (OPCoD), where each student's self-distillation is conditioned on its own correct rollout and feedback from its peer. To make feedback exchange effective, OPCoD uses cognizance-based gating to decide when to give feedback and feedback anchoring to ground feedback in the problem. On Science Q\&A tasks, OPCoD consistently outperforms baselines and achieves Pareto improvement across all evaluated domain pairs and students.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM): Agent-Based Finite Element Modeling of Concrete Bridge Barriers

arXiv:2606.12025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite element (FE) modeling of safety-critical infrastructure such as bridge barriers requires high-fidelity nonlinear dynamic analysis, yet the current FE modeling process remains labor-intensive and lacks automation. This paper presents the Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM) framework, a collaborative human-agent protocol that decomposes long-sequence finite element modeling into discrete, visually verifiable checkpoints across geometry generation, boundary condition definition, and material assignment. The framework is demonstrated through a 20-case matrix of reinforced concrete bridge barriers under MASH TL-4 and TL-5 lateral loading conditions, interfacing specialized agents with two widely used commercial FE softwares, i.e., ANSYS and LS-PrePost. Experimental results show that HELM improves the baseline autonomous modeling success rate from 20% to 75%, with agent-level pass rates for geometry and boundary condition tasks approximately doubling. Error analysis reveals that spatial reasoning and algebraic logic limitations constitute the primary failure modes, underscoring the value of structured human-in-the-loop intervention for modeling automation. The complete agent design code and prompts are open-sourced and can be accessed at: https://github.com/SimAgentDev/Ansys-LSPP-AgentKit.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

D2H-AD: A Hybrid Model Utilizing Hyperdimensional Computing for Advanced Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.13754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anomaly detection is a fundamental component of intelligent systems with applications in healthcare, cybersecurity, smart grids, and IoT environments. Although conventional machine learning and deep learning methods have demonstrated effectiveness in identifying anomalies, they often rely on large labeled datasets, incur high computational costs, and face scalability challenges in edge and high-dimensional settings. This paper presents D2H-AD, a novel anomaly detection framework based on Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), a brain-inspired paradigm that represents information using high-dimensional distributed vectors. Unlike existing HDC-based methods, D2H-AD integrates distance-based similarity and density-aware encoding within a unified framework, improving anomaly representation and detection performance. Ablation studies show that hyperdimensional encoding alone yields up to 5.4% higher ROC-AUC than applying the same density-distance scoring directly in the original feature space. Furthermore, D2H-AD consistently outperforms five established baselines, namely HDAD, ODHD, One-Class SVM, Isolation Forest, and Autoencoders, across all evaluated datasets. The framework is lightweight, interpretable, and computationally efficient, making it suitable for resource-constrained and real-time applications. We validate D2H-AD on five benchmark datasets and demonstrate superior F1-score and ROC-AUC performance, together with robustness to class imbalance, noise, and data complexity. In addition to improved accuracy, D2H-AD offers scalability, a small memory footprint, and low-latency operation enabled by binary computations and a compact design. These properties make it particularly attractive for TinyML and edge AI deployments. The proposed framework highlights the potential of HDC for accurate, interpretable, and energy-efficient anomaly detection in dynamic environments.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Stepwise Token Selection for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), inference cost is largely dominated by the visual token prefix rather than the language backbone, making token reduction a key factor for improving efficiency. Existing approaches typically assign independent importance scores to visual tokens and retain a fixed number of top-ranked tokens, implicitly assuming token independence and a uniform compression ratio across inputs. In this work, we reformulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision-making process. Specifically, we introduce a pointer-style selection mechanism that iteratively chooses informative tokens, conditioning each decision on previously selected ones, and dynamically determines when to stop via a learned termination action. This enables joint optimization of both the selected subset and its size. To enable end-to-end training under standard language modeling objectives, we design a differentiable relaxation based on a variance-preserving noise interpolation scheme, allowing gradients to propagate through the discrete selection process. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms fixed-ratio baselines across different compression levels. Under aggressive pruning that removes 88.9% of visual tokens, our method preserves 94.6% of the original accuracy while achieving a 1.88x speed-up in prefill latency.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Logical error estimation from syndrome data of surface-code experiments

arXiv:2606.11496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decoders for quantum error correction (QEC) experiments rely on detector error models (DEMs), which encode, for each error, its probability and the detectors and logical observables it flips. Here we show that estimating DEM event probabilities from experimental syndromes is feasible, avoids independent device benchmarking, and produces useful decoder priors for estimating and reducing decoded logical error probabilities. We evaluate our methods using open-source data from surface-code memory experiments performed on Google's Willow chip, and we carry out analogous surface-code experiments on IBM's \texttt{ibm\_miami} processor. Despite the different physical error scales of the Google and IBM devices, in both cases our estimated DEMs improve logical error probabilities relative to baseline device-informed DEMs, typically at the $5\%-10\%$ level and with larger gains in some IBM cases, without additional calibration circuits, decoder fine-tuning, or supervised fitting to logical outcomes.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Fantastic Scientific Agents and How to Build Them: AgentBuild for Rietveld Refinement

arXiv:2606.12834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As scientific workflows shift from deterministic executables to LLM-based agents, the development practices on offer, such as fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and prompt-and-go, bury the scientist's judgment. We propose treating agent construction as a workflow stage and introduce AgentBuild, which builds a scientific agent from a contract the scientist authors. The contract is a version-controlled rubric, a difficulty-graded curriculum, and a curated external knowledge base. A rubric-driven judge gates a meta-optimizer coding agent that edits the agent within a declared boundary, so the build compiles the agent, not the scientist's judgment. We instantiate this for Rietveld refinement of X-ray diffraction data through GSAS-II behind MCP and A2A, where a blank-harness construction run progresses through a lithium lanthanum zirconium oxide (LLZO) signal-to-noise ladder, reaches the 4 hour scan as a frontier case, and exposes the workflow-scope limits that remain. The same rubric that rewards credible fits also scores trajectory scope, making the frontier a contract failure rather than a pattern-fitting failure. As base models evolve, re-running AgentBuild is a re-tune, not a rebuild, and the scientist's authored contract remains the durable asset.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Exact Federated Continual Unlearning for Ridge Heads on Frozen Foundation Models

arXiv:2603.12977v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models are commonly deployed as frozen feature extractors with a small trainable head to adapt to private, user-generated data in federated settings. The ``right to be forgotten'' requires removing the influence of specific samples or users from the trained model on demand. Existing federated unlearning methods target general deep models and rely on approximate reconstruction or selective retraining, making exactness costly or elusive. We study this problem in a practically relevant but under-explored regime: a frozen foundation model with a ridge-regression head. The exact optimum depends on the data only through two additive sufficient statistics, which we turn into a communication protocol supporting an arbitrary stream of add and delete requests via fixed-size messages. The server maintains a head that is, in exact arithmetic, pointwise identical to centralized retraining after every request. We provide deterministic retrain-equivalence guarantees, order and partition invariance, two server-side variants, and a Bayesian certificate of zero KL divergence. Experiments on four benchmarks confirm the guarantees: both variants match centralized ridge retraining to within $10^{-9}$ relative Frobenius error and complete each request at orders-of-magnitude lower cost than federated retraining baselines.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Lightweight and Interpretable Transformer via Mixed Graph Algorithm Unrolling for Traffic Forecast

arXiv:2505.13102v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unlike conventional "black-box" transformers with classical self-attention mechanism, we build a lightweight and interpretable transformer-like neural net by unrolling a mixed-graph-based optimization algorithm to forecast traffic with spatial and temporal dimensions. We construct two graphs: an undirected graph $\mathcal{G}^u$ capturing spatial correlations across geography, and a directed graph $\mathcal{G}^d$ capturing sequential relationships over time. We predict future samples of signal $\mathbf{x}$, assuming it is "smooth" with respect to both $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathcal{G}^d$, where we design new $\ell_2$ and $\ell_1$-norm variational terms to quantify and promote signal smoothness (low-frequency reconstruction) on a directed graph. We design an iterative algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and unroll it into a feed-forward network for data-driven parameter learning. We periodically insert graph learning modules for $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathcal{G}^d$ that play the role of self-attention. Experiments show that our unrolled networks achieve competitive traffic forecast performance as state-of-the-art prediction schemes, while reducing parameter counts drastically.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

JE-IRT: A Geometric Lens on LLM Abilities through Joint Embedding Item Response Theory

Standard LLM evaluation practices compress diverse abilities into single scores, obscuring their inherently multidimensional nature. We present JE-IRT, a geometric item-response framework that embeds both LLMs and questions in a shared space. For question embeddings, the direction encodes semantics and the norm encodes difficulty, while correctness on each question is determined by the geometric interaction between the model and question embeddings. This geometry replaces a global ranking of LLMs with topical specialization and enables smooth variation across related questions. Building on this framework, our experimental results reveal that out-of-distribution behavior can be explained through directional alignment, and that larger norms consistently indicate harder questions. Moreover, JE-IRT naturally supports generalization: once the space is learned, new LLMs are added by fitting a single embedding. The learned space further reveals an LLM-internal taxonomy that only partially aligns with human-defined subject categories. We also show that simple linear probes of the embedding space recover cross-subject ability directions, such as an arithmetic axis that highlights quantitatively demanding questions in seemingly distant subjects like virology and global facts. JE-IRT thus establishes a unified and interpretable geometric lens that connects LLM abilities with the structure of questions, offering a distinctive perspective on model evaluation and generalization.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Beyond Runtime Enforcement: Shield Synthesis as Defensibility Analysis for Adversarial Networks

arXiv:2606.13621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shielded reinforcement learning is typically presented as a runtime safety mechanism that compiles temporal-logic specifications into automata restricting an agent's actions. We argue this is the wrong product. The same automata-theoretic machinery – specification compilation, product game construction, attractor computation, and winning-region extraction – is better read as a design-time analytical instrument whose outputs are structural insights about a system rather than runtime constraints on a deployed agent. We instantiate this through a constrained two-player safety game for network defense. The two specifications are enforced asymmetrically: the defender specification defines the unsafe region of the game, whereas the attacker specification restricts the adversary's legal actions during attractor computation. Solving the game yields a defensibility verdict – a formal certificate that a topology-specification pair is or is not defensible – with the associated winning region and shield. Beyond the binary verdict, we derive topology-level metrics from the attractor structure and combine them with post-convergence behavior from shield-constrained adversarial multi-agent reinforcement learning. Together these form a defensibility fingerprint capturing both a network's formal safety properties and its operational behavior under adaptive play. A what-if analysis shows that formal defensibility and operational effectiveness capture distinct aspects of security: small architectural changes can produce large shifts in operational outcomes while leaving formal safety margins nearly unchanged. Shield synthesis is thus most valuable not as a deployment mechanism for safe agents, but as a framework for answering architectural questions about whether, where, and how a system can be defended. The defensibility verdict is the output, not the safe policy.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Seed-Guided Semi-Supervised Clustering by A-Contrario Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.18833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces a semi-supervised clustering framework grounded in the statistical duality between grouping principles and anomaly detection. We address the challenge of robust cluster definition in noisy environments – a task where partitioning algorithms often over-assign outliers and density-based methods remain sensitive to heuristic global parameters. Drawing on a-contrario statistical reasoning and Gestalt proximity principles, we define a cluster as a maximal subset of data points containing no anomalies relative to a null hypothesis of uniform randomness. Central to this approach is the Perception algorithm, which utilises a principled expectation-based threshold ($\mathbb{E} < 1$) to identify outliers without manual parameter tuning. By treating clustering as the dual of anomaly detection, we employ an iterative ``clustering-by-exclusion'' mechanism. The algorithm is seed-guided, leveraging minimal user-provided labels to initialise robust cluster medians and form initial groups, which are subsequently expanded by admitting non-anomalous points. This approach naturally isolates fringe points, isolated noise, and emerging unknown clusters. We evaluate the method on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, including image and text datasets represented through raw, linear-reduced, and neighbourhood-preserving embeddings. Results demonstrate that with as few as 10–30 seeds per cluster, the proposed method achieves competitive and often very strong performance under a practical low-tuning benchmarking protocol, while maintaining linear scalability with respect to both observations and dimensionality for a fixed number of seeded clusters and iterations.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A complexity theory for non-local quantum computation

arXiv:2505.23893v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces a local interaction between two systems with a single round of communication and shared entanglement. Despite many partial results, it is known that a characterization of entanglement cost in at least certain NLQC tasks would imply significant breakthroughs in complexity theory. Here, we avoid these obstructions and take an indirect approach to understanding resource requirements in NLQC, which mimics the approach used by complexity theorists: we study the relative hardness of different NLQC tasks by identifying resource efficient reductions between them. Most significantly, we prove that $f$-measure and $f$-route, the two best studied NLQC tasks, are in fact equivalent under $O(1)$ overhead reductions. This result simplifies many existing proofs in the literature and extends several new properties to $f$-measure. For instance, we obtain sub-exponential upper bounds on $f$-measure for all functions, and efficient protocols for functions in the complexity class $\mathsf{Mod}_k\mathsf{L}$. Beyond this, we study a number of other examples of NLQC tasks and their relationships.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimized Quantum States for Sensing in the Presence of Loss and Phase Noise

arXiv:2606.19649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Squeezed vacuum lets gravitational-wave detectors and other quantum sensors surpass the standard quantum limit, and is optimal in the loss-limited regime; phase noise breaks this optimality. Numerically optimizing the quantum Fisher information across the loss and phase-noise landscape, we identify non-Gaussian states that outperform any Gaussian state. These fall into three classes: Fock-like, cubic-phase-like, and states with discrete rotational symmetry. Limiting the average number of photons in the input state to $\bar{n}=5$, with $1-\eta = 5\%$ photon loss and 200 mrad phase noise, the non-Gaussian advantage reaches up to 2.2 dB. Furthermore, we observe that the non-Gaussian advantage can persist even when the measurement strategy is homodyne detection.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semi-Supervised Speech Confidence Detection using Pseudo-Labelling and Whisper Embeddings

arXiv:2606.16505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding speaker confidence is crucial in educational settings, as it can enhance personalised feedback and improve learning outcomes. This study introduces a novel framework for detecting speaker confidence by integrating human-engineered features with embeddings from the Whisper encoder. To address data limitations, a pseudo-labelling technique is employed to expand the labelled dataset, allowing the model to learn from both human-annotated and model-generated labels. The framework combines traditional speech features including pitch, volume, rate of speech, and the presence of disfluencies and stress, with Whisper embeddings, and uses a co-attention mechanism to fuse these representations and achieve an overall accuracy of 75%. This study contributes to advancing speech analysis, enabling applications that support personalised learning and speaking skill development.